Ancient (Old) Iranian

Of the ancient Iranian languages, only two are known from texts or inscriptions, Avestan and Old Persian, the oldest parts of which date from the 6th century bce. Avestan (an extinct East Iranian language) was probably spoken in northeastern Iran, and Old Persian (an extinct West Iranian language) is known to have been used in southwestern Iran. Other ancient Iranian languages must have existed, and indirect evidence is available concerning some of these. Thus, from the 5th-century-bce historian Herodotus, the Median word for “female dog” (spaka) is known, and a number of Median loanwords have been recognized in the Old Persian inscriptions. In addition, a number of Median personal names are attested in various sources. It is likely that all those languages that are known only from the Middle Iranian period were in fact spoken in a less developed form in the ancient period. It is possible that the same observation applies to some of those modern Iranian languages that are not attested in the earlier periods.

The degree of mutual intelligibility that existed among the ancient Iranian languages is not known with certainty. The differences in the nature of the surviving sources have to be borne in mind. On the one hand, there is the religious poetry of Zoroaster in the Avestan language and, on the other, the official inscriptions of the Achaemenid rulers in Old Persian. Differences in the method of transmission present a further difficulty in the way of direct comparison. Nevertheless, it can safely be stated that the degree of mutual intelligibility must have been much greater between the ancient languages than between the Middle Iranian languages and that those languages geographically closer to each other probably were mutually understood better than those spoken in areas farther apart.

Avestan can hardly be said to be known beyond the ancient period, although only the earliest texts, the Gāthās (short hymns written by Zoroaster), are as old as the 6th century bce, and the later texts represent the language of several subsequent centuries. Old Persian, on the other hand, itself spanning the 6th to the 4th century bce, was continued more or less directly by the various forms of Middle Persian. Even in this case, however, although both Old and Middle Persian represent the language of the royal court, the considerable differences between them remain unexplained.

Middle Iranian

Middle Persian is known in three forms, not entirely homogeneous—inscriptional Middle Persian, Pahlavi (often more precisely called Book Pahlavi), and Manichaean Middle Persian. The Middle Persian form belongs to the period 300 bce to 950 ce and was, like Old Persian, the language of southwestern Iran. In the northeast and northwest the language spoken was Parthian, which is known from inscriptions and from Manichaean texts. There are no significant linguistic differences in the Parthian of these two sources. Most Parthian belongs to the first three centuries ce.

Middle Persian and Parthian, extinct West Iranian languages, were doubtlessly similar enough to be mutually intelligible, but they differ so greatly from the eastern group of Middle Iranian languages that those must have appeared to be almost foreign languages. The languages of the eastern group, moreover, cannot have been themselves mutually intelligible. The main known languages of this group are Khwārezmian (Chorasmian), Sogdian, and Saka. Less well-known are Old Ossetic (Scytho-Sarmatian) and Bactrian, but from what is known it would seem likely that those languages were equally distinctive. There was probably more than one dialect of each of the languages of the eastern group, although there is certainty only in the case of Saka, for which at least two dialects are clearly attested. The main Saka dialect is known as Khotanese, but a small amount of material survives in a closely related dialect called Tumshuq, formerly known as Maralbashi.

A few words are known in all of these eastern Iranian languages from as early as the 2nd to the 4th century ce, but substantial evidence begins for Sogdian in the 4th century, for Saka probably no earlier than the 7th century (though that for Tumshuq may be a few centuries older), and for Khwārezmian not until the 12th century and later. The principal evidence for Bactrian belongs to the 2nd century. To the same period belong the Scytho-Sarmatian names of the earliest inscriptions.

All the eastern Iranian languages of the Middle Iranian period were spoken in Central Asia, with the exception of the language of the Scytho-Sarmatian inscriptions from what is now Ukraine, north of the Black Sea. More precisely, Bactrian was spoken in northern Afghanistan and in the adjacent parts of Central Asia. Khwārezmian was the language of Khwārezm, a historic region in present-day Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan but formerly of greater extent. Scholars believe that Sogdian was probably spoken over most of Central Asia, especially in eastern Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and western Kyrgyzstan. There were also colonies of Sogdians in various cities along the trade routes to China; in fact, most Sogdian material comes from outside Sogdiana. The Saka dialects, Khotanese and Tumshuq, were spoken in Chinese Turkistan, modern Xinjiang; Tumshuq is the name of a small village in the extreme west of Xinjiang. Khotanese was spoken near the modern city of Hotan (conventional spelling Khotan) on the southern route across the Takla Makan Desert and within about 100 miles (160 km) to the north and to the east of Hotan, where manuscripts have been found, mainly at the sites of former shrines and monasteries.

Modern Iranian

The discontinuity already observed between Old and Middle Iranian is even more striking between Middle and Modern Iranian. There are no modern counterparts to Khwārezmian, Bactrian, and Saka, and there is no direct continuity in the case of any of the other Middle Iranian languages. Even Modern Persian does not represent a straightforward continuation of Middle Persian but is rather a koine (a dialect or language of a small area that becomes a common or standard language of a larger area), based mainly on Middle Persian and Parthian but including elements from other languages and dialects. Although Sogdian is known in several forms, possibly representing different dialects, none of these can be considered the direct ancestor of modern Yaghnābī, spoken at present in the valley of the Yaghnob River, a tributary of the Zeravshan. Yaghnābī, nevertheless, certainly belongs linguistically to the Sogdian family. Similarly, the languages of the Scytho-Sarmatian inscriptions may represent dialects of a language family of which Modern Ossetic, an East Iranian language, is a continuation, but it does not simply represent the same language at an earlier date.

Only four of the many modern Iranian languages are the official languages of the state in which they are spoken. The chief of these is Persian (known in Persian as Fārsī), a West Iranian language and the national language of Iran, which is spoken by about 30,000,000 people as a native language. A dialect of Persian known as Dari is recognized, moreover, as a second language in Afghanistan. The national language of Afghanistan is the East Iranian language known as Pashto, of which there are some 35,000,000 speakers, the majority of whom live in Pakistan. Tajik, another West Iranian language, is spoken by more than 7,000,000 people widely spread throughout Tajikistan and the rest of Central Asia and is readily intelligible to speakers of Persian, to which it is very closely related, although it is in some respects more archaic.

In addition to being the national language of Tajikistan, Tajik is important as the lingua franca of the Pamirs mountain range, a region where a remarkable variety of Iranian languages and dialects are spoken. Some 500,000 people speak Ossetic. Most of the Ossetes live in North Ossetia in Russia and South Ossetia in Georgia. Although spoken in the heart of the Caucasus, Ossetic is an East Iranian language not mutually intelligible with any other Iranian language.

Two other Iranian languages, Kurdish and Balochi (Baluchi), are spoken over a vast area, although they have not been officially accepted as the national language of an established state. Kurdish is spoken by more than 11,000,000 people living in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Transcaucasia. More than 6,000,000 people speak Balochi as their chief language; they are spread widely over parts of eastern Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. In Iran, Balochi speakers live mainly in Baluchistan, a region in the southeast that now forms part of a province with Sīstān. In Pakistan, Balochi speakers live mainly in the southwestern province of Balochistān; in Central Asia, they are found mainly around Mary (Merv) in southern Turkmenistan; and in Afghanistan, they are widely scattered, mainly over the southwestern portion of the country. There is a sizable Baloch colony in Oman, and many Baloch merchants have settled in the sheikhdoms of southern Arabia and along the east coast of Africa as far south as Kenya. Linguistically, Balochi and Kurdish are both West Iranian languages. Balochi is thus much more closely related to Kurdish than it is to its close neighbour Pashto. According to the most likely theory, the present eastern location of Balochi speakers is the result of migrations from the region of the Caspian Sea during the Middle Ages.

Dialects

The six modern Iranian languages discussed above are the only ones that have an established literary tradition. They are not, however, homogeneous, each having its own dialect divisions. No definitive dialect classification has yet been made, nor indeed has any attempt at systematic classification of the whole range of Iranian languages won wide acceptance. The usual practice, followed here, is simply to list the main languages in groups of varying size, arranged on a roughly geographic basis.

There are two main dialects of Ossetic: the eastern, known as Iron, and the western, known as Digor (Digoron). Of those, Digor is the more archaic, Iron words being often a syllable shorter than their Digor counterparts—e.g., Digor madä, Iron mad “mother.” Iron is spoken by the majority of Ossetic speakers and is the basis of the literary language. Chosen in the 19th century for the translation of the Bible, it is still the official language today. Little is known of the other Ossetic dialects. A small amount of the Ossetic dialect of Tual in the south, which differs little from Iron, was published in Georgian script at the beginning of the 19th century.

Yaghnābī is still spoken by a small number of people southeast of Samarkand, Uzbekistan. It has two main dialects, eastern and western, which differ only slightly. The characteristic difference is between a western t sound and an eastern s sound from an older θ sound (as th in English thin)—e.g., western mēt, eastern mēs “day,” beside Sogdian mēθ (Christian Sogdian myθ).

Dialects of the Shughnī group are spoken in the Pamirs. Closely related to this group is Yāzgulāmī. A period of a Yāzgulāmī-Shughnī common language (protolanguage) has been postulated by some scholars, after which it separated first into Yāzgulāmī and Common Shughnī; and then Common Shughnī gradually divided into Sarīkolī, Oroshorī-Bartangī, Roshānī-Khufī, and Bajuvī-Shughnī. Sarīkolī, the easternmost of these dialects, is spoken in northwestern China.

Speakers of Wakhī number more than 50,000 or so in the region of the upper Panj River. Vākhān (Wākhān), the Persian name for the region in which Wakhī is spoken, is based on the local name Wux̌, a Wakhī development of *Waxšu, the old name of the Oxus River (modern Amu Darya). (An asterisk denotes a hypothetical, unattested, reconstructed form or word.) The Wakhī language is remarkably distinct from its neighbours and has many archaic features.

Around the bend of the Amu Darya and in the valley of the Vardūj River to the southeast, a few people speak dialects of the Sanglechī-Ishkashmī group. That group is clearly distinguished from its neighbours but is closely related to the other languages of the Pamirs.

Some 11,000 people speak dialects of the Yidghā-Munjī group. Monjān is a very remote valley located in northern Afghanistan, and it is separated by a mountain pass from the Sanglechī-speaking region. Yidghā is spoken in the valley of the Lutkho River and in the nearby city of Chitrāl, a region now in Pakistan. Yidghā-Munjī is most closely related to Pashto.

The existence of two dialectal groups within Pashto has long been known. Thus, the word Pashto represents a southwestern dialect form (paštō), in contrast to a northeastern (paxtō). According to one hypothesis, Pashto literature, which exists certainly from the 17th century and possibly from the 11th, was created among the northeastern tribes. Two minor dialects, Wazīrī and Waṉētsī, have some features of special interest.

Although spoken in a few villages in Afghanistan, two languages have features closely associating them with Western Iranian. These are Parāchī, spoken in the Hindu Kush north of Kabul, and Ormurī, found in two dialects, one in the Lowgar River valley south of Kabul and the other in Kāniguram in Wazīristān.

Farther south is the wholly West Iranian language Balochi, mentioned above. Despite the vast area over which Balochi is spoken, its numerous dialects are all mutually intelligible. The most recent study of the Balochi dialects divides them into six groups: Eastern Hill dialects; Rākhshānī dialects including that of Mary; Sarawānī; Kechī; Loṭunī; and the coastal dialects. Of these, Rākhshānī is the most widely spoken and is used for broadcasting both in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, but the coastal dialects have the greatest prestige and the most extensive literature. In the southeastern corner of Iran, Balochi gradually gives way to the Bashkardī dialects.

In central Iran the influence of Modern Persian is everywhere strongly felt, and it is often difficult to distinguish between dialects of Modern Persian, Persian with dialectal traits, and closely related languages. In the cities of Yazd and Kermān the Parsis speak the old Gabrī dialect, whereas the Muslims speak Persian. Among other central dialects are Nātanzī, Sōī, Khunsārī, Gazī (near Eṣfahān), Sīvandī (northeast of Shīrāz), Vafsī, and Ashtiyānī, to name but a few.

Semnānī, spoken east of Tehrān, forms a transitional stage between the central dialects and the Caspian dialects. The latter are divided into two groups, Gīlakī and Māzandarānī (Tabarī). Also closely related is Tālishī, spoken on the west coast of the Caspian Sea on both sides of the border with Azerbaijan. To this northwestern group belong the so-called southern Tātī dialects spoken south and southwest of Qazvīn, as well as the scarcely known dialects of Harzan and Galinqaya spoken northwest of Tabriz. The name Tātī is usually applied to the dialects spoken in Russian Dagestan and northeastern Azerbaijan. They differ little from Modern Persian. Of the several dialects of Fārs province, only Larī, southeast of Shīrāz, is notably distinctive. Kumzarī in Oman and the Lur dialects of the southwest also differ little from Persian.

There are many dialects of Kurdish, the widely spoken West Iranian language that is thought to occupy a dialectal position intermediate between Balochi and Persian. Three main dialect groups can be distinguished—northern, central, and southern. A systematic study has been made of the dialects of Iraq, which include ʿAqrah (Akre), ʿAmādīyah, Dahūk, Shaykhān, and Zākhū in the northern group, and Irbīl (Arbīl), Bingird, Pishdar (Pizhdar), Sulaymānīyah (Suleimaniye), and Wārmāwah in the central group. The Central Mukrī dialect is spoken in the extreme west of Iran, south of Lake Urmia.

Gorānī is spoken in several dialects, mainly in the Zagros Mountains, and it is strongly influenced by the surrounding Kurdish dialects. The Gorānī dialect of Hawrāman, Hawrāmī, is notable for its many archaic features. Closely related to Gorānī is Zaza (Dimli), which is spoken west of Iran.

Historical survey of the Iranian languages

The Iranian protolanguage and its development

By the time Iranian begins to be attested in the 6th century bce, the language is already found differentiated into several distinct languages. Scholars have reconstructed the sound system and some of the grammatical features of Common Old Iranian, the protolanguage that preceded these dialects.

The phonological system that underlay Common Old Iranian was by and large maintained everywhere throughout the Iranian-speaking world. It consisted of the following distinctive consonant sounds:

Unfamiliar symbols are taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet, or are conventional transcriptions (e.g., š for the shsound in ship, ž for the zh sound in azure, č for ch in church, and ǰ for j in jam). The voiced fricatives (i.e., the first three consonants represented in the fourth column—ɣ, β, and ð), which are produced with vibrating vocal cords and local friction, may be regarded as variants of the voiced stops (e.g., g, b, d); but they are characteristic of Iranian languages generally and especially of the eastern Iranian languages. In addition to these sounds Old Persian had another sibilant sound, often transcribed as ç or ss, which developed from the cluster θr (pronounced as the thr in three). In Middle Persian it fell together with the s sound. The most noticeable alteration of the old sound system is the introduction in some languages of additional series of consonants under the influence of neighbouring languages. Thus, Ossetic has a series of ejective sounds (uttered with a simultaneous glottal stop) on the pattern of the unrelated Caucasian languages; and a number of Iranian languages have a retroflex series (produced with the tongue tip curled up toward the roof of the mouth) as a result of contact with Indo-Aryan languages.

Some of the differences between Iranian languages arose as a result of different developments of the earlier sounds. Thus, the Indo-European sounds ḱ, ǵ, and ǵh resulted in Indo-Iranian ś, ź, and źh, which in turn became s, z, and z, respectively, in Avestan but θ, d, and d in Old Persian. Hence, Indo-European *ḱṃtó- “hundred” became Indo-Iranian *śatá-, attested by Old Indo-Aryan śatá-, and then Avestan sata-, but Old Persian θata-. Nevertheless, θ and d as well as s and z belong to the basic pattern, the difference being merely distributional.

The main source of differentiation is in the variation of consonant cluster development and that of groups of consonants and semivowels. There again it is mainly a question of distributional differences. Thus, the Indo-European group *ḱuˆ became Indo-Iranian *śuˆ, retained in Old Indo-Aryan in the spelling śv of the standard transcription. Indo-Iranian *śuˆ developed variously in Iranian: s in Old Persian, sp in Avestan and Median, ś (written śś) in Khotanese, and š in Wakhī. These developments can be seen in the following forms of the Indo-European word *eḱuˆo- “horse”: Old Indo-Aryan áśva-, Avestan and Median aspa-, Old Persian asa-, Khotanese aśśa-, and Wakhī yaš. Yet another development can be seen in Ossetic, in which the word for “mare,” Avestan aspā-, appears as Digor äfsä and Iron yäfs.

The vowel system of Common Old Iranian consisted of short and long varieties of a, i, and u, and a neutral vowel ə (similar to the a in sofa). That analysis assumes that the Indo-Iranian vocalic r (r̥) had already developed to ər in Proto-Iranian, just as its long counterpart became ar. An early and general monophthongization of the diphthongs ai and au to ē and ō, respectively, also must be considered characteristic, although it should not be ascribed to Common Old Iranian as is sometimes done. This basic system was almost everywhere maintained, sometimes with the addition of one or two distinctive vowel sounds (phonemes).

The Old Iranian stage

Old Persian was the language of the Achaemenid court. It is first attested in the inscriptions of Darius I (ruled 522–486 bce), of which the longest, earliest, and most important is that of Bīsitūn. At Bīsitūn are also inscribed versions of the same text in Elamite and Babylonian, and fragments of an Aramaic version on papyrus documents from Elephantine (modern Jazīrat Aswān) also exist. Old Persian words and names also are to be found in large numbers as loanwords in contemporary Elamite sources and in 5th-century-bce Aramaic documents.

As early as the time of Darius the Great’s successor, Xerxes I (ruled 486–465 bce), the inscriptions show linguistic tendencies characteristic of the development from Old to Middle Persian. After Xerxes the production of original Old Persian inscriptions declined, probably as a result of the wider adoption of Aramaic and Elamite as the usual means of writing. With Artaxerxes III (ruled 359/358–338 bce), Old Persian inscriptions came to an end. The break is marked by Alexander’s destruction of Persepolis in 330 bce.

By far the largest part of attested Old Iranian is written in the language now usually called Avestan, after the Avesta, the name given to the collection of works forming the scripture of the Zoroastrians. The name itself is Middle Persian. In former times this language was called Zend, another Middle Persian word, which refers to the Middle Persian (Pahlavi) commentary on the Avesta. Because the homeland of the Avestan language was long thought to be in Bactria, it was often in the past called Bactrian. Bactrian is now used to designate a different Iranian language belonging to the Middle Iranian period.

Since the beginning of the 20th century it has been generally accepted that the homeland of the Avesta was Khwārezm, which in ancient times included both Merv and Herāt. Merv is now in Turkmenistan, Herāt in northwestern Afghanistan.

The oldest part of the Avesta is known as the Gāthās, the poems composed by Zoroaster (Zarathustra), the founder of the Zoroastrian religion. His date is uncertain but is traditionally ascribed to the 7th to 6th century bce. The so-called Khurda Avesta (“Little Avesta”) is a miscellany of texts of later date, the oldest parts of which may have been composed about 400 bce. The language of the Khurda Avesta is different in many details from that of the more archaic language of the Gāthās, and it may even represent a different dialect. Many uncertainties surround the detailed interpretation of the Avesta as a result of the method of transmission. The Avesta was not recorded until after the language had ceased to be used, except by Zoroastrian priests. The present manuscripts date from the 13th century and later, although they reflect the recording of the priestly tradition in the special Avestan script during the 6th century ce.

The Middle Iranian stage

Middle Persian, the major form of which is called Pahlavi, was the official language of the Sāsānians (224–651 ce). The most important of the Middle Persian inscriptions is that of Shāpūr I (d. 272 ce), which has parallel versions in Parthian and Greek. Middle Persian was also the language of the Manichaean and Zoroastrian books written during the 3rd to the 10th century ce.

The extant literature of the Zoroastrian books is much more extensive than that of the Manichaean texts, but the latter have the advantage of having been recorded in a clear and unambiguous script. Moreover, the Middle Persian of the Zoroastrian books does not simply represent the spoken language of the writers of the 9th-century Zoroastrian texts. It is probable that they spoke early Modern Persian and that their speech often impinged upon their writing but that they strove to write the Middle Persian of several centuries earlier as it was attested in the inscriptions of the early Sāsānian dynasty when Middle Persian was the koine. By contrast, in the case of Manichaean Middle Persian, some texts survive unchanged from the 3rd century ce, the time of the Persian teacher Mani himself (216–274 ce).

Very little Parthian survives from the pre-Sāsānian period. A large number of Parthian ostraca (inscribed pottery fragments) from the 1st century bce were discovered at Nisa near modern Ashkhabad, but they are inscribed in ideographic Aramaic (i.e., Aramaic writing that uses Aramaic words as symbols to represent Parthian words). Dating before the 3rd century are a document from Hawrāman, some coin legends, and a dated grave stela.

The most copious and important material in Parthian is the work of the Sāsānian kings of the 3rd century, who added a Parthian version to their inscriptions—Ḥājjīābād, Naqsh-e Rustam (Ka’be yi Zardusht), and Paiküla. A few decades later Parthian disappeared as a result of the rise of the Sāsānians and the predominance of their native tongue, Middle Persian. Manichaean Parthian of the 3rd century was preserved as a church language in Central Asia.

The oldest surviving Sogdian documents are the so-called Ancient Letters found in a watchtower on the Great Wall of China, west of Dunhuang, and dated at the beginning of the 4th century ce. Most of the religious literature written in Sogdian dates from the 9th and 10th centuries. The Manichaean, Buddhist, and Christian Sogdian texts come mainly from small communities of Sogdians in the Tulufan (Turfan) oasis and in Dunhuang. From Sogdiana itself there is only a small collection of documents from Mount Mugh in the Zarafshān region, mainly the business correspondence of a minor Sogdian king, Dewashtich, from the time of the Arab conquest about 700.

The relationship of the various forms of Sogdian to one another has not yet been sufficiently investigated, so that it is not clear whether different dialects are represented by the extant material or whether the differences can be accounted for by reference to other relevant factors, such as differences of script, period, subject, style, or social milieu. The importance of social milieu can be seen by comparing the elegant Manichaean literature directed to the court with the more vulgar language of the Christian literature directed to the lower classes.

Of the Saka dialect known as Tumshuq very little has survived, and despite its evidently close relationship to the much better known Khotanese dialect, full interpretation has proved difficult. Knowledge of Khotanese is more firmly based on a substantial corpus of material, including extensive bilingual texts. Although the chronological range of the extant Khotanese material is limited to only a few centuries, probably the 7th to the 10th, a rapid development of the language is apparent. At the phonological level, most noticeable is the loss of syllables between the older and later stages of the language. Thus, hvatana- “Khotanese” at the oldest stage is successively weakened to hvatäna-, hvaṃna-, hvana-, hvaṃ. At the morphological level, most striking is the tendency to simplify the case endings and even to replace them by analytical expressions, constructions of two or more words. Thus, Late Khotanese has rakṣaysā hīya rāde “kings of the rākṣasas,” whereas Old Khotanese would have rakṣaysänu rrunde. The Old Khotanese -änu ending is unmistakably genitive plural, but the Late Khotanese -ā is merely a general oblique plural ending and has been reinforced by hīya “own,” used to mean “of.”

Hotan was a great centre of Buddhism during the 1st millennium ce, and all the surviving literature in Khotanese is either Buddhist or coloured by Buddhism. Even in business documents and official letters the Buddhist background is usually not difficult to discern. It can scarcely be coincidental that the Buddhist literature of Hotan, flourishing so vigorously during the 10th century, ended abruptly with the Muslim conquest at the beginning of the 11th.

Little survives of Bactrian and Scytho-Sarmatian. Knowledge of Bactrian is based almost entirely on a single inscription of 25 lines from Āteshkadeh-ye Sorkh Kowtal in northern Afghanistan. Even less is known of Scytho-Sarmatian.

Little is also known of Old Khwārezmian; that is, Khwārezmian written in the indigenous Khwārezmian script. Apart from a few coin legends and inscriptions on silver vessels, the material that survives consists of inscriptions of the 2nd century ce from Topraq-qalʿah (Toprakkala) and of the 7th from Toqqalʿah, archaeological sites in Uzbekistan. Much more is known of Late Khwārezmian, written in the Arabic script. That material is found mainly in two Arabic works, the 13th-century fiqh work of Mukhtār al-Zāhidī, called the Qunyat almunyah, and the Arabic dictionary Muqaddimat al-Adab of Abu al-Qāsim Maḥmūd ibn ʿUmar al-Zamakhsharī (1075–1144), of which a manuscript glossed in Khwārezmian was found.

Modern Iranian

Of the modern Iranian languages, by far the most widely spoken is Persian, which, as already indicated, developed from Middle Persian and Parthian (with elements from other Iranian languages such as Sogdian) as early as the 9th century ce. Since then, it has changed little except for acquiring an increasing proportion of loanwords, mainly from Arabic. Persian has been a literary language since the 9th century, and there is an increasing awareness of the continuity of its literary tradition with the earlier periods.

As the national language of Iran in succession to Middle Persian, it has for centuries strongly influenced the other Iranian languages, especially on Iranian territory. In fact, it seems likely that, with the increase of modern methods of communication, Persian will eventually supplant entirely most of the other languages and dialects. Against this trend stand only Kurdish and Balochi, the speakers of which tend to regard their languages as an expression of their particular identities. Nevertheless, even Kurdish and Balochi have been and continue to be strongly influenced by Persian.

Outside Iran the situation is rather different. In Afghanistan the first national language is Pashto, even though Persian is the official second language. Pashto became the official language by royal decree in 1936, and literary activity has been encouraged by the Pashto Ṭolana (Pashto Society) of Kabul. During the Soviet period both Ossetic and Tajik received official encouragement; nevertheless, both languages were displaced by the Russian language as the language of administration.

Other languages also compete with Ossetic and Tajik. Though it has a large body of folk epics, Ossetic became a literary language only in the second half of the 19th century. By contrast, the neighbouring Georgian has a still flourishing ancient literary tradition dating back to the 5th century ce and has many more speakers. Tajik, on the other hand, has a lifeline through its close connection with Persian, but it too has been retreating before Uzbek, an unrelated language of the Turkic group.